Dario Zamarian will be Dell's first VP for networking, possibly signaling an increased focus on the area
by Stephen Lawson
Dell has hired Cisco Systems veteran Dario Zamarian to lead its networking business, naming him as its first vice president dedicated to that division.
Zamarian has joined Dell as vice president and general manager of the networking division, the company announced on Thursday. Zamarian worked at Cisco for six years, most recently as vice president of systems and network management.
Networking has been a fairly small part of Dell's business so far, but the company has become more active in this area as it gears up to compete with the likes of Hewlett-Packard and Cisco in supplying all parts of a data center. The appointment of a vice president to lead networking may signal an accelerated push into this arena. In slightly more than a year, Dell has signed deals to resell network equipment from Juniper Networks, Brocade Communications and wireless LAN vendor Aruba Networks. The company also has a line of homegrown LAN equipment, which carries the PowerConnect brand.
Darren Thomas, who had been leading both the storage and networking businesses at Dell, will continue to run the storage division.
Dell's strength has traditionally been in PCs and servers, but the company has been trying to build up its portfolio in storage and networking, the other two big pieces in the data center puzzle. It failed in a bid to buy high-end storage vendor 3Par earlier this year after HP won a dramatic bidding war with a US$2.4 billion final offer. At least one analyst has speculated that Dell might try to acquire Brocade, a storage networking player that itself got into Ethernet LANs in 2008 by acquiring Foundry Networks.
Networking traditionally has been a commodity business at Dell, but virtualization and cloud computing have made the network a critical piece of a converged data center architecture, said Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Jon Oltsik.
"Now they have to have some network expertise and network management expertise just to build the kinds of bigger data centers that they're going after," Oltsik said. The appointment of Zamarian signals that Dell is acting to make this a reality, he said.
The Dell announcement marked the second time this week that a midlevel executive from Cisco, the dominant enterprise networking vendor, has left to join a rival company in a high-level role. On Monday, Polycom announced that Joseph Burton, former chief technology officer for unified communications at Cisco, had joined Polycom as chief strategy and technology officer.
NOTE : why will these guys leave cisco for any other company for that matter?
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Google, others settle with DOJ over no-poaching deals , Sep 24, 2010 06:40 pm
Six companies have agreed not to strike deals that prevent each other from hiring away valuable employees
by Nancy Gohring
Google, Apple and several other companies have reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice over charges that they agreed not to hire away high-profile workers from each other.
If approved by the court, the proposed settlement will conclude an investigation that started in the middle of last year. The DOJ says the companies acted anticompetitively by agreeing not to cold call each others' employees to offer them jobs.
The deals were between Apple and Google, Apple and Adobe, Apple and Pixar, Google and Intel, and Google and Intuit, according to the DOJ. The first such agreement was made in 2005 between Apple and Adobe.
The DOJ filed a civil lawsuit on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and simultaneously filed a proposed settlement.
The DOJ said the no-solicitation agreements eliminated a significant form of competition to attract highly skilled employees and deprived employees of the chance at better jobs.
It also said senior executives at the companies actively managed the deals. For instance, Apple and Intuit each complained to Google that it had violated agreements between the companies, and Google investigated the incidents, the DOJ said. Each time, Google found it had not violated its agreements.
The suit implies that Adobe was bullied into its deal with Apple. Apple approached Adobe about agreeing not to cold call each other's employees, according to the DOJ. "Faced with the likelihood that refusing would result in retaliation and significant competition for its employees, Adobe agreed," the suit says.
As part of the settlement, the companies have agreed not to ban cold calling and not to enter, maintain, or enforce any kind of agreement that prevents competition for employees. The deal, which still must be approved by the court, would be in effect for five years and require the companies to take compliance steps to ensure they stick to it.
Google said it made the agreements not to cold call employees at Apple, Intel and Intuit in order to maintain a good relationship with the companies.
"Our policy only impacted cold calling, and we continued to recruit from these companies through LinkedIn, job fairs, employee referrals, or when candidates approached Google directly," Amy Lambert, Google associate general counsel, wrote in a blog post.
"While there's no evidence that our policy hindered hiring or affected wages, we abandoned our 'no cold calling' policy in late 2009 once the Justice Department raised concerns, and are happy to continue with this approach as part of this settlement."
In a statement, Intel denied any wrongdoing. "Intel does not believe its actions violated the law nor does the company agree with the allegations," it said. "The company is settling the matter because it believes it would not harm the company nor its ability to do business."
Adobe and Apple did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
NOTE : let there be competition, it's good for the employees.
by Nancy Gohring
Google, Apple and several other companies have reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice over charges that they agreed not to hire away high-profile workers from each other.
If approved by the court, the proposed settlement will conclude an investigation that started in the middle of last year. The DOJ says the companies acted anticompetitively by agreeing not to cold call each others' employees to offer them jobs.
The deals were between Apple and Google, Apple and Adobe, Apple and Pixar, Google and Intel, and Google and Intuit, according to the DOJ. The first such agreement was made in 2005 between Apple and Adobe.
The DOJ filed a civil lawsuit on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and simultaneously filed a proposed settlement.
The DOJ said the no-solicitation agreements eliminated a significant form of competition to attract highly skilled employees and deprived employees of the chance at better jobs.
It also said senior executives at the companies actively managed the deals. For instance, Apple and Intuit each complained to Google that it had violated agreements between the companies, and Google investigated the incidents, the DOJ said. Each time, Google found it had not violated its agreements.
The suit implies that Adobe was bullied into its deal with Apple. Apple approached Adobe about agreeing not to cold call each other's employees, according to the DOJ. "Faced with the likelihood that refusing would result in retaliation and significant competition for its employees, Adobe agreed," the suit says.
As part of the settlement, the companies have agreed not to ban cold calling and not to enter, maintain, or enforce any kind of agreement that prevents competition for employees. The deal, which still must be approved by the court, would be in effect for five years and require the companies to take compliance steps to ensure they stick to it.
Google said it made the agreements not to cold call employees at Apple, Intel and Intuit in order to maintain a good relationship with the companies.
"Our policy only impacted cold calling, and we continued to recruit from these companies through LinkedIn, job fairs, employee referrals, or when candidates approached Google directly," Amy Lambert, Google associate general counsel, wrote in a blog post.
"While there's no evidence that our policy hindered hiring or affected wages, we abandoned our 'no cold calling' policy in late 2009 once the Justice Department raised concerns, and are happy to continue with this approach as part of this settlement."
In a statement, Intel denied any wrongdoing. "Intel does not believe its actions violated the law nor does the company agree with the allegations," it said. "The company is settling the matter because it believes it would not harm the company nor its ability to do business."
Adobe and Apple did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
NOTE : let there be competition, it's good for the employees.
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